Eunomia has been publicly warning for four years now that the UK’s “dash for trash” will leave us – like Sweden, the Netherlands and some of our other Northern European neighbours – with more residual waste infrastructure than we really need.

I suspect that the departure of Eric Pickles from the role of Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government will not be widely mourned amongst council officials. His replacement, Greg Clark, had a previous stint as minister of state in the department between 2010 and 2012, and subsequently held the cities brief. While it may be too early to pronounce with confidence that a major change of approach is in the air, Clark is a strong advocate of decentralisation of power, and might reinvigorate the localism agenda that fell by the wayside as Pickles increasingly sought to bend councils to his will.

My husband vividly recalls being made to write out ‘the mastication of glutinous substances is obnoxious’ 100 times on the blackboard when caught chewing in class. Although symbolising the anti-social mindlessness of adolescence for many a schoolmaster, the problems associated with chewing gum are, regrettably, not confined to the Just William classrooms of yesteryear.

The one commonly accepted fact about the Waste Regulations is that they aren’t well understood. Local authorities across England, Wales and Northern Ireland are grappling with the question of whether separate household collections of glass, metal, paper and card are “necessary” and “practicable”. In the absence of case law and with the Environment Agency only now starting to make clear how it will approach enforcement, these poorly defined concepts are far from easy to apply. But I’ve come across some interesting and difficult cases lately that help to reveal what the Regulations might mean in practice.

Can there still be anyone involved in managing local authority waste collection services that hasn’t heard the phrase TEEP? The requirement to collect four recyclable materials separately, where doing so is necessary and technically, economically and environmentally practicable, is one of the rare examples of a waste story that has crossed over into the mainstream press, albeit in the garbled form of stories about Europe requiring us all to have extra bins.

A few weeks ago I was asked by MRW if I would provide some comments on what waste-related policies we might expect to see in the manifestos of the major political parties as we move towards the 2015 general election. This is what I wrote:

How is England performing on waste management, and what are the prospects for the future? Last year, Defra announced its intention to step back in areas of waste management where businesses are better placed to act and there is no clear market failure. Now the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (EFRA) Committee has launched an inquiry examining approaches to the recycling and treatment of municipal waste in England, and the impact of the reduction of Defra’s activities.